Flanders Fields, January 2014

Flanders report, 24-27 January 2014: Over the course of the weekend Baldrick and I visited 22 cemeteries…

…and how lucky we were as day one, spent to the north of Ieper (Ypres), turned into the most glorious January afternoon you could imagine…

…with a beautiful winter sunset to finish it off.

Day two found us in Ieper (look out for a major update on the Menin Gate, above) before we headed for French Flanders on Sunday…

…where photographs simply cannot do justice to the foul weather that set in during the course of the afternoon (above & below). I actually cannot remember encountering worse weather on any of our previous trips, and it would have been easy to have packed it in and headed for home. Baldrick and I, however, are made of sterner stuff, and retreat was never a serious consideration. The men buried in these cemeteries had to contend with conditions like these day after day, night after night; the least we could do as we paid our respects was put up with it for a couple of hours.

And we knew there was a warm home with hot food and cold beer awaiting us at the end of the day.

The final morning found us up on the Passchendaele ridge (above, Passchendaele church on the horizon)…

…where the sun paid us a brief visit before it was time for the drive to Lille for fond farewells and the Eurostar home. Another trip to Flanders was over far too soon, over 1300 new photographs have been added to the library, and you, you lucky people, will get to see most of them over the ensuing months. Once I get a decent broadband connection, that is.

Likewise Balders. Thanks as ever for your immaculate chauffeuring – you do realize that we had no mud issues (as in ‘getting stuck in’) on this trip!! Remarkable. Btw I still have no decent internet at ‘home’, wherever home is these days. I am using a dongle that takes maybe a minute to load each page. That is if it doesn’t time out instead. So I really cannot communicate effectively until all this gets sorted out. The telecom people tell me that it will get sorted on Thursday. Bearing in mind that it will be the third visit by an engineer, I will believe it when I see it.